I read the reviews of my books, though most pundits advise authors never to do that. A good review can give me a lift for days. I’m grateful for the ones that pick up a mistake (such as the fact that To Wed a Proper Lady still has chapter 22 and 23 transposed even though I loaded a new file for it months ago–will fix again! And check afterwards to see if it is right.) And people who just don’t like the kind of books I write don’t bother me. There’s stuff I don’t like, too, and I can only wish them happy reading.

Modern names that aren’t

Every now and then, though, there’s a review I steam over. The only ones that upset me are examples of what has been called the Tiffany Effect. The Tiffany Effect is named after the idea that Tiffany is a modern name, when it was common in the thirteenth century and achieved the modern spelling in the seventeenth. Here’s more about the Tiffany Effect and other names that seem modern but have actually been around for a while.

Strong-minded and independent women

Lady Hester Stanhope was a famous woman explorer.

Another idea I hear quite a bit is that my women are too strong-minded for the Regency era. Really? It is, of course, true that the dominant (male) opinion of women in Regency times saw them as adjuncts to their husbands; meek creatures who needed to be protected from the harsh realities of life, and who did not have a thought their husbands didn’t put there. Women lacked the physical strength or mental capacity, so such men said, to understand anything outside of the domestic sphere. Some women undoubtedly accepted their assigned role. Some did not.

Here’s an article about Regency business women, including the owners of two highly successful banks. And here’s another about Georgian and early Victorian women who didn’t so much as break the mould as refuse to even get into it. And yes, a woman — or at least a lady — who refused to conform faced consequences. How serious those were depended on how much power she held. If she was wealthy and single or a widow, or if her marriage settlement gave her control of her own finances, people might gossip behind her back, but that would be it.

Those further down the social scale faced less of a barrier to independence, at least in terms of income-earning. Women still commonly worked alongside their men in the family trade, though this would change in more successful merchant families in the Victorian era. And women, since they were cheaper than men, filled many positions that required deftness rather than strength in industries as diverse as cotton mills, mines, and china painting.

Marriage as a bad life-choice

Many people believe that, in the past, marriage was the only option for women, and that unmarried women were to be pitied. Certainly, men wrote this way during the Regency era, and especially in the Victorian era that followed. I write romance, so marriage tends to be on the table as reasonable choice. But research suggests one third of all women never married. Shortage of men during the Napoleonic Wars might be one reason. Loss of independence and the risks of childbirth were right up there, too, as I’ve written in an earlier post. And the frequent incidence of two close female friends who set up house together and are fond companions may well include many platonic relationships, but we have some rather frank diaries that witness to what today would be same-sex marriages.

Women warriors

Kyz Saikal, a woman warrior from Turkish history, as featured on a Turkish stamp

The Victorian era, was also responsible for removing the glamour of woman as warrior.

Women played an important role in the British military, performing a wide range of services until the mid-nineteenth century. In the eighteenth-century stories, songs and ballads about female soldiers — women who in real life dressed as their male counterparts to go to war or sea — enjoyed an enormous popularity and serve to challenge our contemporary notion that Florence Nightingale was the first woman to work in a modern combat situation. The Amazons’ stories, however, changed over time and by the nineteenth century had to be sanitized to conform to a more genteel and fixed concept of femininity. Gender had increasingly become identified as a biological entity rather than a social and external construction. Thus the female soldiers came to be regarded as aberrations of nature rather than slightly risqué heroines and military historians rewrote earlier armies into all-male institutions. [Julia Wheelwright. “Amazons and Military Maids” in Women’s Studies International Forum: Volume 10, Issue 5, 1987, Pages 489-502]

As for military sports, archery was popular with both genders, and we have evidence of women fencers in the Georgian and the Victorian eras, so presumably in the Regency too. The participants were ladies, who had the leisure for such sports. Women boxers were of the lower sort, but a popular drawcard. My own women warriors are outliers, being foreign-born, in an imaginary Central Asian kingdom headed by a non-traditional woman and her supportive husband. Iran and Central Asia have an ancient tradition of female warriors, which certainly would have been legendary by the end of the eighteenth century, when my Mahzad was kagana in Para-Daisa Vada, east of the Caspian Sea. But Mahzad had the stories there to build on as she raised her own daughters and their female bodyguards.

Healers and hygiene

Dr James Barry trained in Edinburgh, performed the first Caesarian in which both woman and child lived in around 1820, and was discovered to be a woman after his/her death in 1860.

A recent review assured the world that my female healer in To Mend the Broken-Hearted was anachronistic in her insistence on cleanliness in her sick room. The reviewer claimed special knowledge because of her profession, and pointed out that the relationship between hygiene and patient health depended on developing a germ theory of health, and even after that, was established only with great difficulty between the end of the nineteenth century and first part of the twentieth century. Which is true, as far as received wisdom passed on in the medical training of Western physicians. It is an incomplete truth, however. Established medicine fought vigorously to resist the idea that doctors were killing their patients by refusing to wash their hands.

But as early as the mid eighteenth century, James Lind (the same man who introduced citrus fruit to naval vessels to reduce scurvy) observed that patients in clean sickrooms were more likely to get well than patients in dirty conditions. He later practiced as a physician in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh-trained doctors have been prominent in the history of medical hygiene. I’ve mentioned Alexander Graham, another Edinburg man, in my article on hand-washing and puerperal fever. Doctors continued to resist the idea that they carried disease from sick people to the birthing chamber for a long time after Graham proposed it.

Meanwhile, though, the navy continued Lind’s prescription of clean sickrooms, and a number of others practiced cleanliness as part of the more general idea of disinfection, a custom that goes back to at least the Greeks, if not earlier. Without a proper theory of the causes of illness, our ancestors could still see that cleanliness and disinfection made a difference.

The practice of keeping women sequestered in their own quarters made medical practice by women essential in the Eastern world.

Add to this, my female healer was trained in Persian and Arabic medical practice. Persian treatises on cleanliness in the sickroom go back into ancient history. The holy texts of both Islam and Judaism command hygiene as a response to illness.

Islamic medicine developed further through many translations from the East and West in the Abbasid Period. Muslim and non-Muslim physicians combined early Indian and Greek medicine and systemised it further. Some works during this period are devoted to hygiene (hifz al-sihha), while the maintenance of health is included in general medical books as well. For example, Ibn Sīnā (or Avicenna; d. 1037) discussed hygiene in his Canon of Medicine (Al-Qānûn fi’t-tıb). In his system of medicine, medical practice was combined with physical and psychological factors, drugs and diets — or “holistic” medicine. [Hakan Coruh, Theology, Health, and Hygiene]

My reviewer’s knowledge of the history of her profession is undoubtedly excellent, but only as far as it relates to main-stream Western medical training in the past 150 years.

Another reviewer was scathing about my villainous vicar’s misappropriation of funds in Lord Calne’s Christmas Ruby. The bishop gets the tithe, not the rector, she said. In the Regency era, the tithes went straight to the rector, and there was such abuse of the system that it led to legislation a few years later. I’ve written about the regency system here.

Sucking it up

Ah well. If I’m going to continue resisting the whole author’s note idea, I suppose I’m going to see more reviews where I’m wrongly accused of poor research. And I’m still not intending to have a character called Tiffany, because truth is stranger than fiction.